Shane Jarman was up a ladder decorating a Christmas tree at the school where he was deputy headteacher when he got a call asking him to come to Rotherham hospital ASAP. It was December 2007 and Jarman’s wife, Claire, had given birth the previous day to their first child, a girl called Emma, so of course he rushed to the phone. All was well, he was told, but that “everything would become clear” when he got to the hospital.
Once there, his wife told him – somewhat unexpectedly – that they were going to meet Dolly Parton. Was he a little nervous about the nails? If Rotherham – or at least a gathering of local dignitaries that assembled later in a disused steelworks – was a little bemused by the singer, Parton knew places like this, and of course knew how to charm.
I’ve been practising because it don’t look like that on paper. In the States, anything that’s h-a-m we have to say Rother-ham.” Among the torrent of tributes to the entertainer, businesswoman and philanthropist since her death on Monday, Rotherham too has been remembering the impact of a woman who, for all her own glamour, cared deeply about places that had a little less of it. Parton may have jested when she said she had considered buying a South Yorkshire pied-à-terre (“so you may be walking down the streets of Rotherham and see me coming out of a little cubbyhole somewhere”), but her description of the post-industrialist town as “a heart spot for me” was sincere, thanks to the similarities she saw to her own outsider upbringing.
Don’t make fun of me.” The scheme ensured that every child in Rotherham was posted a free book, in their own name, for each month of their life until they were five, funded partly by Parton’s foundation and partly by the local authority and other local funders. Deborah Bullivant, who took over leading the Rotherham Imagination Library shortly after Parton’s visit as part of a wider literacy drive, said that despite some initial scepticism from locals, it “changed the culture” for many. What is this thing?” she said.
For many families who didn’t really have a background in reading, it changed the culture within their homes to being more of a reading culture and embracing books and using books and sharing books.” The fact that the literacy drive was so personal to the singer was “the best way to counter any of the suspicion or worries that people had about it”, Bullivant said. She doesn’t know about this? She understood she needed to drive her own work herself from scratch.
She got the importance of the imagination, of reading, of telling stories.” Though the Rotherham scheme was wound up in 2015 after the council withdrew support, it would be rolled out to other places in Britain, including Doncaster, North Lincolnshire, the London borough of Southwork (“Hello Suth’rk! This is Dolly!”) and Nottingham (which even coaxed an “Ay up me duck!” from the singer). In total, 6.3m books have been given to children across the four UK nations since one-day-old Emma Jarman received the first one in 2007, a copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which Parton autographed for her. (Globally, the figure is 300m).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
